Cost of Stress

From a post written in August 2016

A recent article posted at cnu.org/publicsquare raises questions about mankind's evolving intelligence in regards to transportation.

The leading cause of death in the US (according to the CDC)  is heart disease, followed by cancer, then chronic lower respiratory disease, with the fourth leading cause of death as unintentional injuries. Of the 136,000 accident deaths in 2015, 38,000 were by the automobile (Newsweek) .

This raises a question. As mankind population expands, has it always been normal for mankind to die as a result of the mode of transportation? When the only form of travel was walking, was it normal to trip and fall, killing the traveler? Then, as animals were used as a common mode of transportation, was it common for people to fall off the animals to their death? 

The question expands: is it common and acceptable for transportation to cause death? Has transportation always been a common source of death? Why then are train deaths and airplane deaths as a percentage of miles traveled so much less than the automobile? 

The conclusion of the unanswered questions is that the presumption shows more examples of the automobile being unsustainable. In a related study, financial aspects to automobile wrecks were found by the NHTSA in 2014 to show an annual economic loss of $836 billion. 

A society based on an unsustainable foundation will collapse.  Philosophically, in a realistic way; the nature of growth is to expand. The course of automobile politics has stifled advances in transportation innovation. The automobile centric land-use design is unsustainable environmentally, economically and socially. This political procedure has to end for mankind to grow. It is the nature of man to grow and explore. Confinement harbors restriction and control which is the nature of slavery.